Richard Dawkins - Anti -Christ or Great Thinker?

"but 'sophisticated' theology is what dawkins' critics castigate him for not dealing with"

Sorry, but Dawkins & co. should be castigated for their utter disdain of history, philosophy and culture in general.

^^^ otm

"he... "lacks historical thinking.""

definitely - this is his biggest problem. This and his proclivity for parodic positivism.

Sorry, but Dawkins & co. should be castigated for their utter disdain of history, philosophy and culture in general.

this is simply unfair tbh.

As I said upthread, as a "believer" I think that atheism is an important, unavoidable issue.
Unfortunately "new atheists" are neither interesting nor really challenging - and beside their hatred for "religion" (please define it), their ideas on society and culture have a sour aftertaste of intellectual absolutism.

in terms of intellectual absolutism i think they run a pretty poor second to religion the major religious bodies and traditions in the world today.

So in the end, are you saying that they're a bit like their dreaded counterparts? :)

i'm saying - and i hate to be so po-faced after yr smiley face - that i can't remember the last time anyone was mutilated, or murdered, or refused medical care, or forbidden from taking control over their own body and life, in the name of atheism.

http://cdn.wn.com/pd/23/d0/2b6d733b7a342a46e426d336e7f2_grande.jpg

so what is it

it's the cathedral of christ the savior in moscow, or it was

ok ya got stalin. but i don't think you really want to enter into a numbers game.

Intellectual absolutism 101:

'Nothing and no one can in any way permit the killing of an innocent human being, whether a fetus or an embryo, an infant or an adult, an old person, or one suffering from an incurable disease, or a person who is dying. Furthermore, no one is permitted to ask for this act of killing, either for himself or herself or for another person entrusted to his or her care, nor can he or she consent to it, either explicitly or implicitly. Nor can any authority legitimately recommend or permit such an action' - Pope John Paul II

That Macdonald shit is hilarious. What a windbag!

A good number of people has been killed in the name of atheism, but I think this is a problem of the killers, not of atheism per se. I think the same also about religion.

When it comes to Dawkins, I'm just saying that attacking religion on merely pseudo-scientific grounds is somehow naive and that in the memetic theory there are some disturbing social and historical implications. Also, I'd like to see a little more effort in the imagining of the post-religious society and its ethics, codes, politics. Atheism is/should be an all-embracing life perspective, I'd like to understand if it can be more than just an utilitarian/materialistic stance.

but I think this is a problem of the killers, not of atheism per se. I think the same also about religion.

even when it is the religous leaders who are recommending the killing?

that i can't remember the last time anyone was mutilated, or murdered, or refused medical care, or forbidden from taking control over their own body and life, in the name of atheism.

loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooool

to go back to that "utter disdain for history" thing....

A good number of people has been killed in the name of atheism, but I think this is a problem of the killers, not of atheism per se. I think the same also about religion.

Marco OTM throughout

Apologists circumvented this theological difficulty simply by asserting that god was not “personal” (i.e., an agency), so god wasn’t responsible.

The whole 'How do you explain EVIL?' gotcha that new atheists use has always failed to move me in favor of their argument. If God is the end-all be-all and contains everything in the universe, then why wouldn't he/she/it include evil? Once again it feels like someone arguing against the strawman tribal deity that appears in cartoons and movies.

omnibenevolence is a pretty traditional characteristic of yer god. 20 odd million deaths in the bible notwithstanding.

omnibenevolence is a pretty traditional characteristic of yer god

no it is not! God fucks shit UP in the Old Testament! Shiva! etc

God kills everybody and everything with a fucking flood iirc

God tortures one of his hapless followers for NO REASON and when that follower demands an explanation he just heaps derision on him!

I thought the new testament rolled out xtianity 2.0, or 1.1 or something, with the kinder gentler god who wasn't going to do that anymore.

well there's that whole rapture/eternal damnation in hell thing

"Once again it feels like someone arguing against the strawman tribal deity that appears in cartoons and movies."
to be fair, I think Veggie Tales has always elided the "why does God allow evil" discussion, so it's an argument worth having.

don't think the NT has a whole lot to say about Hell, not least because it wasn't really part of the tradition of Judaism at that point?

immaterial anyway, god doesn't have to contain multitudes or be a badass to be omnibenevolent, it's simpler to argue that humans just don't see the big picture. Borges wrote something funny about that iirc

But if God didn't allow evil, then evil would be something created outside of God, and God really wouldn't be God would he? He would just be another freelance deity.

Sure, evil is less of a problem if you view God as a capricious whimsical bastard, handing out edicts from on high more or less at random, only to be obeyed through fear of eternal damnation. xposts.

unless there is no evil aaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh

well of course religion's killed more people, we've had more time to believe in it

look i mean the problem with this argument is that like nobody is disputing that science was a tremendous invention, possibly the most useful one ever, and has found things religion never could, and also that properly used it provides exactly the same kind of spiritual succor, and should totally be proselytized as such, vigorously and consistently

furthermore, few people here would probably dispute that organized religion has been responsible for all kinds of crushingly nasty shit -- people who formed a club in being assholes shocker -- although some who aren't quite as eager to identify a Primary Fount Of Historical Evil (besides, y'know, us) might also point out that there is beauty and transcendence in hymns, stained-glass windows, minarets, confessionals, hindu cosmology, blake, ecclesiastes, michelangelo, tolstoy (admittedly a rogue, but always a jesus guy) and even some late-70s dylan songs, and that while technically the eternal verities in stuff like this could have been attained with good unaffiliated secular thoughtfulness and some acid they are also inextricably caught up in the machinery and informed by the details of their specific faiths, which are cluttered attics full of spiders but also treasures amidst the silly tchotchkes. that aside, sure, i would like to see the catholic church stop telling people that condoms spread aids, and the frowning bloody-minded mullahs to either drop their dawkins-esque self-righteousness or just check into a home somewhere and yell at the TV, and the spanish inquisition and the crusades and the pogroms and the destruction of the Old Believers and brideshead revisited never to have happened, and of course it's super important not to bury these things and to remember what can happen when you let people think they're really profoundly right about things

it's just that richard dawkins -- who is, 200 years after kierkegaard, amazed and theatrically disgusted to come across abraham/isaac; who lacks the aesthetic sense to treat one of the pillars of world literature with any more respect than a sneering schoolboy; whose knowledge of history is nil; whose actual scholarly knowledge of religion barely goes beyond the C of E sermons he could bring himself to pay attention to at the age of 9, which is a little like writing a book about shakespeare having only read the Childrens' Illustrated Classics versions; whose tone is callow, self-righteous, and mean; who relentlessly flatters the sense of intellectual superiority in his incurious middlebrow audience; who complains at one point about "turn the other cheek" because it's weak and pathetic and useless, which makes you wish MLK was around to cuckold him -- is not the man for this job. because he's a preening uneducated dullard. i like hitch though!

Borges wrote something funny about that iirc

if you're thinking of the leopard thing it's one of the best two paragraphs ever written by anyone

on a pedantry tip cos it's a stupid argument but i'm not sure that between the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and Communist China to name just a few big players, atheism isn't ahead on the death count

Hitchens is at least funny. also well read.

xp

Nazi Germany

disallowed

crut on the money of all moneys up there

From the half-light of dawn to the half-light of evening, the eyes of a leopard, in the last years of the twelfth century, looked upon a few wooden boards, some vertical iron bars, some varying men and women, a blank wall, and perhaps a stone gutter littered with dry leaves. The leopard did not know, could not know, that it yearned for love and cruelty and the hot pleasure of tearing flesh and a breeze with the scent of deer, but something inside it was suffocating and howling in rebellion, and God spoke to it in a dream: You shall live and die in this prison, so that a man that I have knowledge of may see you a certain number of times and never forget you and put your figure and your symbol into a poem, which has its exact place in the weft of the universe. You suffer captivity, but you shall have given a word to the poem. In the dream, God illuminated the animal's rude understanding and the animal grasped the reasons and accepted its fate, but when it awoke there was only an obscure resignation in it, a powerful ignorance, because the machine of the world is exceedingly complex for the simplicity of a savage beast.

Years later, Dante was to die in Ravenna, as unjustified and alone as any other man. In a dream, God told him the secret purpose of his life and work; Dante, astonished, learned at last who he was and what he was, and he blessed the bitternesses of his life. Legend has it that when he awoke, he sensed that he had received and lost an infinite thing, something he would never be able to recover, or even to descry from afar, because the machine of the world is exceedingly complex for the simplicity of men.

that one mitchell and webb sketch about god and abraham is about 100000000000 times a better critique than anything dawkins has ever written imo

xp -- i didn't even read it because i've already read it but i got chills just knowing it was there

in what sense is Nazi Germany disallowed?

yeah that passage is fantastic but i think i was thinking of something else, maybe "Deutsches Requiem"

well of course religion's killed more people, we've had more time to believe in it

Also, for a while 'science', 'religion', 'the government', and 'the military' were all kind of rolled up into a big oppressive ball.

parties that make living deities of their leaders are dq'ed from the atheist death tally, so that pretty much disqualifies, everyone?

If we're going all-out for this big, always fucking stupid, "aah your ideology causes WARS" debate, how many people has capitalism killed?

look you have to spend money to make money

"money" = "malnourished taiwanese", except the second time when it = "money"

Yeah which religion were the Nazis following again? Pretty sure most of them aren't really down with killing millions of people.

http://cdn1.iofferphoto.com/img/item/200/081/314/german-army-uniform-belt-buckle-413ee.JPG

it's complicated. but they weren't an atheistic regime.

nazism is full of weird syncretic central-european christianity plugged into a bunch of abruptly invented stuff about The Elder Races, and lots of them were really into runes, so let's just leave them alone for now